POS = "Proof of stake" here, not the more common use of POS. PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as secure as PoW. I don't have much faith in crypto helping unbanked populations, as there is a pretty high learning curve. You can easily wipe away all your money if you do a step wrong or loose a private key.

It is yet to be proven if it is "as secure" because no PoS network has operated at scale.

It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins...

Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not, things can happen to those stakeholders outside their control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in bad faith against the network.

> It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins...

As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control of the network because they hold the most computational power?

And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.

Have a look at cosmos.network for successful decentralized dPoS network. Also Binance chain is built using Cosmos SDK, one could argue it is not decentralized enough, but it is certainly secure enough.

I'm not sure what you mean by "at scale" but ETH2 PoS has been operating for several months now, and currently has over 100,000 validators with over $6 billion staked.

> PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as secure as PoW.

Lol. And we're just supposed to believe you, right? Show me one POS which is as secure as POW.

While slightly out of date by now (doesn't have the latest years) and only having data from two sources (localbitcoins & paxful), this research from CoinDesk shows that the P2P market for cryptocurrencies have been growing solidly in the "unbanked" world, especially Venezuela: https://observablehq.com/@coindesk-research/localbitcoins-pa...

Thanks do you have any with the number of unique account? I'm not too sure volumes of bitcoin means anything if people use it illegally.

That's a good idea, but even if I did, I don't think it would give a fair view and creating new accounts/addresses is cheap enough. So someone holding a lot of volume is most likely not holding it in the same address.